Of all the brilliant and impassioned nationalists who led so many British colonies to independence, few embodied as many paradoxes as our first prime minister. Jawaharlal Nehru was a moody idealistic intellectual who felt an almost mystical empathy with the peasant masses; an aristocrat accustomed to privilege who had strong socialist convictions; a product of Harrow and Cambridge who spent several years in British jails; an agnostic radical who became an unlikely protege of Mahatma Gandhi.

EXCERPT

Jawahar tried to talk to Edwina into staying with him after Dickie flew home, for he knew that her heart belonged to him alone. Mountbatten, of course, also "knew that they were lovers," as did all of their close friends. Edwina's sister Mary hated Nehru for it, blaming him for having "hypnotised" her.

For the first 17 years of Independence, Nehru was India. Upon the Mahatma's assassination, Nehru became the keeper of the national flame, the most visible embodiment of the freedom struggle. Despite his dreamy, abstracted air and Brahminical imperiousness, the masses adored him and it did not hurt that he was the Mahatma's chosen heir.

But for all that, he was a convinced democrat, a man so wary of the perils of autocracy that he once authored an anonymous article warning Indians of the dangers of giving dictatorial temptations to Jawaharlal Nehru.

As prime minister he carefully nurtured democratic institutions. But he did little to cultivate alternatives to himself: he was, in the celebrated metaphor, the immense banyan tree in whose shade no other plant could grow.

Such a man would be a fitting subject for a serious biography, and few are better qualified for the task than Stanley Wolpert, doyen of American historians of India and author of well-regarded biographies of Pakistan's Jinnah and Bhutto. It is all the more disappointing that Wolpert falls short in a work of prodigious research, erraticjudgement and, occasionally, deplorable taste.

Wolpert has laboured at length to develop a straightforward chronological narrative of Nehru's life and career - birth in an affluent lawyer's family, education at Harrow and Cambridge, meteoric ascent in nationalist politics as a protege of the Mahatma, marriage, friendships, Partition, prime ministerial glory, humiliating war with China, death.

But his book consists almost entirely of extensive quotes from Nehru's correspondence, diaries and speeches, and the recollections of contemporaries, so that his personages are defined largely by what they said and wrote, rather than by what they did. The bloodlessness of the resultant narrative is made worse by Wolpert's failure to analyse any of Nehru's achievements.

Of his four major legacies to India - democratic institution-building, fiercely committed secularism, socialist economics, and non-alignment-only the fourth merits more than a passing mention in Wolpert's woefully inadequate account.

The Nehru who emerges from these assiduously culled letters is a sensitive and reflective man ("one of the loneliest young men of my acquaintance", Gandhi called him), given to lengthy musings about life and relationships, and dependent on the consolation of books. But aside from quoting these widely available texts, Wolpert adds little to Nehru's portrait of himself. What is new, though, is the odd lapse into gossipy breathlessness:

"So many promises, spoken and unspoken, were communicated among them that night in the eloquent language of trust and love from Nehru's hypnotic eyes to the beautiful faces of Dickie and Edwina, each so sensitively attuned and receptive to the other that words were almost redundant." These words certainly were.

In such attempts to stir the reader's interest, Wolpert makes appalling errors of judgement. There is the preposterous suggestion that Nehru not only intended his daughter Indira to succeed him, but fully expected her sons to rule India too. By putting imaginary thoughts in Nehru's head on the occasion of his remarkable speech on India's Independence, Wolpert makes the 58-year-old statesman sound like a ninny:

"Hateful, horrible Jinnah, the cause of all this killing and the creator of Pakistan." And I squirmed at the author's gratuitous prurience, which ranges from the masturbatory habits of the mentor of one of Nehru's tutors, to wholly unsubstantiated speculation about adolescent homosexuality and arch suggestions of romances which may or may not have occurred ("his loving Padmaja", a "brief but passionate interlude" with US Senator Clare Boothe Luce).

Nehru with Motilal and the clan

The latter is a legitimate subject for biographical inquiry, but Wolpert does not provide context or evidence for his inferences. When he does, as with Nehru's apparent affair with the last British Vicereine, Edwina Mountbatten, he goes too far: it is absurd to suggest that Nehru named Krishna Menon, rather than his sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit, as India's first high commissioner in London in order to facilitate his "top-secret visits" to Edwina.

Wolpert's book provides very little sense of why an aristocratic Anglophile, "as much prejudiced in favour of England and the English as it was possible for an Indian to be", turned against the Raj, why Nehru was attracted to Gandhi's ideas rather than to alternative forms of nationalism, or indeed what the author thinks of the contradictions and complexities of his mercurial protagonist.

For the most part, facts and events follow each other without explanation or comment. And Wolpert runs out of steam before he has scaled the heights of Nehru's career, so that he devotes only 65 pages to the 17 years of Nehru's prime ministership - and even those, largely chronicle his foreign trips.

Though there is some good material in the book-released in the US, expected soon in India-none of it is unavailable elsewhere. But what little value this volume has is marred by sloppy writing and editing: a reference to Gandhi's opposition to "peaceful methods": a claim that an event in 1921 occurred on the "50th anniversary" of the revolt of 1857: a Hindu described as a Muslim: a politician of the 1940s, Buta Singh, being confused with his unrelated namesake of three decades later: and frequent repetitions of the same asides.

Readers seriously interested in Nehru must still turn to Sarvepalli Gopal's magisterial three-volume life or, for a readable popular biography, M.J. Akbar's Nehru: The Making of India, which does not even find mention in Wolpert's bibliography.

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